


addenda sunt

by oncewewerezombies



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternia-Focused, Alternian Empire, Ancestor-Era (Homestuck), Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fate & Destiny, Office Romance, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, References to Canon, Serendipity - Freeform, the troubles of working for clowns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-17
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-11-15 05:13:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11224026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oncewewerezombies/pseuds/oncewewerezombies
Summary: Since nobody would write it for me, I wrote it myself.Prequel, epilog and postscript of a moirallegiance that was not fated, that should not have happened, but happened anyway.





	1. Prequel

**Author's Note:**

> And a youth said, "Speak to us of Friendship."  
> Your friend is your needs answered.  
> He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.  
> And he is your board and your fireside.  
> For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace. 
> 
> Friendship Ixx  
>  _Khalil Gibran_

"And STAY OUT!"

It's your first day on the job and you know you're meant to go in there. A blueblood, immense and stalwart in every way possible is currently bowing his way out of the room the vast roar had originated in. You clutch your case notes for His Mirthful Majesty to your chest, an errand you've been sent on by a senior barbarrister and you are only a Neophyte, a fledge, you have to do what you're told - and you just stare. You have to go in there. You have a dragon for a lusus and you're not overly familiar with fear, but you've felt it enough to know what it tastes like. Acid and metal over the back of your tongue. 

"Of course, my lord."

His voice is careful deference, almost fond you think (fond? Of whatever monster had obviously bitten into something that hurt his tooth in there? How could someone be _fond_ of that), and he draws the doors closed and turns around. Sees you. He's wearing the armour of an archeradicator but you don't know the rank sigils on his collar. Or the sign on his pauldrons. An arrow, barred, deep blue and more than a few shades higher than your own teal. You try to hide that you're uneasy but you can't smell - haven't since you were a pupa - and it does throw off some of the signals at times. The little things that trolls say to each other without words. You've studied to be sharper, better, brighter, so that your not so minor disability doesn't matter (at least you're not blind). You are the Neophyte Redglare, and you are not going to fail on your first night on the job. You've barely even gotten to test out your title yet, taste it, you've barely used it. How sad it would be, to die on your very first real night where you're spreading your barely dry wings.

Pyralsprite would be so disappointed. You can still taste pennies and bile in the back of your throat as you make to step forward, and skirt the blueblood to enter the throne room. You're hoping it won't be suicide, but you feel that it will be. He stops you with a hand in front of you, and shakes his head. He asks what you what you are doing here; you tell him the truth. You've come with a case file and greetings from the Cruellest Bar, about a troll who's words remind them of a danger past. A danger you don't know about, but now you do want to know, and you want to find out. You don't tell him the second part, you keep it to yourself.

"Ah." His eyes are hidden, like yours are too but you can feel them sweep over you from head to foot. Take in your cane, your Imperial crimson and teal tabard, your mark of your blood and your calling. Imperial legislacerator, representative of the Cruellest Bar, a seeker of justice, a dealer out of punishment. Not the executioner, not always, but occasionally. Now you realise you recognise him, and it's like a shock down your bones and you straighten your back further. _The_ Executor. _The_ Darkleer. You're in the presence of a legend, and you curse yourself for not recognising him sooner. "As his bounteous hilarity is in a....mood, I think you had better come with me. No one will miss you if you do not trot back immediately to your hive stable, I'm sure, legislacerator."

He is kind. You had not expected anyone in the Chorthedral to be kind. You don't know why he is wasting his time on you, his kindness, you think it's just because he doesn't like to see tools wasted but it's more than older, better legislacerators have offered you. Or your peers. Your dead nose is something that you've mostly managed to cover for, and you are more than able to boast of your keenness of eye, your quickness of hand, the skill you have with the sword hidden in your cane, but you are aware of how you're endlessly running to cover your deficiencies. You must be better, faster, smarter than any other legislacerator in your peer group - better than the legislacerators one step ahead of you in their training. So far, you've succeeded. That's why you're here. 

But for right now, you drink tea. It's very good. You don't think anyone is going to believe you that you drank tea with the Executor, but here you are nonetheless. He ushers you through your first meeting with the Grand Highblood so you pass through it without mishap, having filled your auricular clots with words of advice and warning just previously. Telling you things about dealing with subjuggulators that you have never heard of before. You suppose, if anyone knows anything about the purplebloods who make up the Empire's shock troops, it would be him. You don't know why he tells you these things; you don't quite dare ask, something about the impenetrable solidness of him discourages it.

The next time you come back, you bring him a different type of tea.

You gain a reputation for being able to deal with clowns. Maybe it's not quite a reputation you deserve, but you have it all the same. _Be respectful, but not afraid_ , he tells you. _At least don't show it. He'll always know that you are, but he appreciates the effort it takes to stand up to him._ He'd paused for a moment then, before continuing with the subtle movement of his eyebrows above the line of his dark-glassed goggles means that he's rolled his eyes. _Usually._ The only thing to know about clowns is that they're always capricious, but it isn't as though you haven't been walking on thin ice for most of your life as it is. You're a legislacerator for goodness sake! You _live_ for that keen knife edge! The very scalpel fine point where law balanced, sweep upon sweep of case law piling up on each other, each proving something different about what the actual, proper justification for a judgement could be.

Neophyte is a title you keep, even past when you could give it up. _You always have to be open to learning_ , you tell your peers as they accumulate new titles, as they advance to things like barbarrister, solicitorturer, horrolegal, attorninja. _I'm just reminding myself that you need to be adaptable._ They sneer, they don't understand. Some of your desire to keep your title may or may not be simply because you like the way he says it. 

Whenever you come to the Carnival Deepest and Most Miraculous to step booted foot onto mirthful ground, he's usually there. Sometimes you bring the tea, sometimes he does. It's a tradition, a ritual. A safe hiding space. Slowly, you let slip a few things and he drops suggestions into your auricular clots, murmurs deep, resonating advice. You don't know why he's made something like a protege of you, but you're not stupid enough to turn it down. You're not foolish enough to spurn any help, and it's _always_ been helpful, he's never lied to you. He is terribly, hideously forthright - even to the subjuggulators. You've heard him do it; personally, you think it's amazing. 

You honestly have no idea how he's still alive. Maybe it's something that the clowns let him get away with, since he's been with them so long? You've heard rumours that apparently that His Mirthful Majesty had plucked the Executor straight out of a blossoming movie career, but you try not to listen to gossip. At least where it was concerning trolls you actually enjoyed the company of. Like you enjoy his. You're trying not to pretend that this is anything other than a schoolfeed crush, but he's the freaking _Executor_ , and fine, he doesn't do the law part but he does do the finishing part. He writes the end scene, for so many criminals and traitors. And he does it so well.

Watching him work is an epiphany. It's what you want to be. Not a single wasted motion, no fanfare. Just pure precision. It's an art; he's an artist.

You're not exactly sure when your feelings for him went from something like hero worship to something like pity. You've never felt the need to climb his mountainous frame, and you don't think you'll ever want to. It's sometime around the point where you notice that his goggles are hiding hollows, that he looks tired, sounds exhausted even though he readily jumps to every order that the Grand Highblood turns out. Whimsical as they may be. He follows every order to the slightest jot and tittle, even if he's mentioned a small objection to some portion of it moments before.

You asked him about it once. He'd just turned away, and he hadn't shrugged but you think it had been implicit in the set of his shoulders. You're entirely rebellious, but you know how good you are. You know what your skills are. You're sick of watching people with a colour a shade or two higher than yours move ahead with little to no effort, when you could run rings around them. When you _have_ run rings around them. Your capture and successful prosecution rate is unmatched; you know your laws, your codicils, your every incident of minutiae back to front and front to back again. You don't understand why he bows so readily to the shade above him, when as far as you can see, he's better than they are. Has a better sense of judgement, at least. Isn't guzzling Faygo all the time, and drowning his thinkpan in sugar syrup.

It's admirable. It's pitiful. You have to wonder would he have been quite as formidable if he'd stayed a movie star, but at the same time, you're glad he's here. You think you would have died on your first night without him, you would have been a teal smear on church walls. If you were lucky.

At some point after the third sweep of working with him, while you're sitting with him drinking tea post-subjuggulator tantrum and you stiffen, realising something. You're _pale_ for him. You abruptly abscond, pleading some impending urgent case or other and begging his indulgence. You can't come close to him until you've sorted this out. It would be unprofessional - worse, it's probably illegal in some way. Unjust. A troll like that probably didn't really consider himself in need of pacifying; his entire job was to platonically pacify the subjuggulator corps, as well as the Grand Highblood and you really can't see yourself treading on those sort of esteemed toes. Not and continuing to live, anyway. And you like living.

It works, for a while.

You avoid him, you thread yourself in and out of the grounds of the Sleaziarchy, performing an adroit dance of avoidance that your tutors would have applauded. If they could have seen it. Part of being able to track a criminal to their lair was the opposite of that, being able to be unfindable, indiscoverable when required. You're really pretty good at both, you just have a sense of how to move to weave in and out of where people are. Like you can feel them coming, the pressure of their thoughts. This is stupid, idle wrigglerthought, of course, but. It's still something you've always thought is true. Somehow, _he still finds you_.

You hesitate, a breath away from fleeing in a much more unregulated and undignified way than even the last time with the tea when he puts his hand out to you. On you, resting heavy against your shoulder as he bends down. He's always been something looming and ponderous, something steady to your law-honed sharpness and edges. You flit, you dance, he walks steady. You like that about him.

"Executor," you say, and you hate the fact that you hear your voice shake. Just a fraction, but more than enough for him to hear it. Damn! You should be steadier than this, nothing should shake your ice cold exterior. You're an agent of the law, after all. You keep your voice short, your words clipped, all business and nothing more. "May I pass? I have work to make my way to. Important work for the Empire."

"...if that is the case, then I would be remiss not to let you pass." Despite his words, he doesn't move. He remains where he is, blocking your way in this long forgotten corridor that you're not sure even the servitors know about. You can hear yourself breathing, and you swallow, force yourself to maintain some sort of regulation on yourself. If you can't, if you won't, then who will? "Still. I think I would...like to offer you a chance to collect yourself. I bought a new type of tea; it's meant to be very...calming."

Is he...fidgeting?

Your eyes glance down at his hand, where his thumb is rolling a slow, repetitive circle against the side of his hand. His expression looks strained, while he waits for your answer. He is _waiting_ for _your_ answer. As though the words you say could mean something.

"I..." You swallow back some carefully thought about reply where you say you won't, you wouldn't want to disturb his night further, and say something else instead. "I think I would enjoy that, Darkleer." You don't know what makes you put your hand forward, but you do and he takes it. His hand folds around yours, so carefully conscious of his strength in a way that for once makes you feel not just fragile but as though you could be safe in being soft - and he smiles

_He smiles_. For you. Because of you. He smiles. In that moment, if you had not been sure already, you would have fallen headfirst into pity. Pale and pure as clean bones, as fresh vellum waiting for judgements to be noted down onto them. Something new, something precious. 

"Excellent. Shall we?"

You're not sure how many trolls would have their first feelings jam in a communal administrativeblock's nutritional space, but the pair of you do. It's not really communal by now, anyway. The two of you had taken it over, and you think that even the chance of the Executor's faintest air of disapproving judgement falling on a troll put most of them off even trying to put walkingstub over threshold. You drink tea, him holding the ridiculously dainty cups he favours between his fingertips as you cradle your bigger mug and gossip. You tell him about Pyralsprite and growing up to the spectre of a dragon as your parental figure, about your...lacking sense, your possible cull sentence. How you can't smell one single thing. He doesn't take it amiss, as you tell him as flatly as you can think of to say. He says that he's noticed, but that he thinks it makes you better at your job in some ways. Not as likely to be offled by some troll's unhappily jumbled pheromones. 

It's about then that he tells you that he realised you were pale for him by the scent you gave off. For a brief, terrible moment, you wish only to die and cover your face with your hands and moan despondently. The thought that you've been so obvious - that someone else besides him could have been clued into your feelings possibly before you even knew yourself - it is, to quote your wriggler self, long left behind the purge of the Cruellest Bar's training - _wicked uncool, bro_. Unrad, even. If he'd shown even a hint of mocking you, you would have left right then and never returned, never come back, even if it had meant throwing in all the contacts and networks you've built up with the lowerbloods who served the Mirthful Church - more useful than most would think. He doesn't. Simply covers your hand and tells you, simply, straightly, that he's glad of it because it gave him the courage to approach you at all.

Since he takes his shades off to do it, you think he even means it.

He tells you about himself as well, and you don't think he mentions things from his wrigglerhood often. Or of the life he had prior to being the Executor. Quite different to this, and you find it all more than just illuminating about him and the troll he's become, but he shrugs when you ask him if he'd go back. If he regretted following the Grand Highblood's orders to throw everything in to become his righthand troll.

"Over time, it's become obvious that it was the place that was waiting for me," he tells you, soft and serious over the cooling pot of steeped leaf juice. "I don't know why the Grand Highblood chose me, out of so many other possible trolls...but...I feel that there was some purpose in my coming here. Serving the Church, in the role I have." He pauses for a moment, then gets up to make you both another pot of hot leaf juice. "Perhoofs I will find it in time."

"I would hate to press, but I feel like perhaps you might have at this point in time."

"A great deal to take on yourself, Neophyte." The way he says your name is like another kind of caress. At least now that you're both in private. You don't think it'll take the same tone when you're back in public. Good. You don't mind the idea of some kind of secret. You know how to keep a secret. You've learned a lot, about keeping your lips closed and knowing when to speak and when to not. The Cruellest Bar was harsh, but you'd learned your lessons. It had taken a few slips and falls, but you know better now. 

After a moment, you rest your hand on his where it's lying on the nutritional plateau and he turns his, fingers lacing through yours. You don't know when you've ever felt so...content. That is the right word for the feeling you have right now, soft and warm. Pleased, but happy is taking too much from the feeling itself. Content. Quiet. You think, despite your unfamiliarity with it, you rather like it.

You want to feel it more often and you think with him, you will.


	2. Epilog

The aftermath of the execution is one of the worst things you've ever experienced.

He's gone, he's gone, and you're numb, you're broken. The two of you had never announced your moirallegiance, had never made it formal. You had kept it between the two of you, neither of you wanting to allow any shadow of impropriety to come on your relationship, on the way you worked so well together. You dare not allow any to know that the Executor's defection (the Expatriate now) has afforded you anything other than irritation at having to get to know a new working partner within the Chorthedral. Nothing more than that, and infinitely less. You dare not let anyone know your feelings, your thoughts. You hate him, almost, or you would. If you could.

Ah, horrorterrors above and below and infinite, if only you could. It would be better for you, if you could hate him. The worst thing is, the _worst_ , is that you still pity him. You want to know why, you want to know how. You thought he was pale for you - you _know_ you were pale for him. You're still pale for him, even if it makes you want to scream and claw out your own eyes, your pusher, to stop these feelings from consuming your thoughts. You were pale for him. You are pale for him. You want him back. _You want him back_.

He'd thrown you off as casually as a subjuggulator discarding an empty Faygo bottle.

He'd left you for this ragged feral, some fucking oliveblood who dabbled in rebellion. In revolution. Who'd dirtied herself with a mutant, something filthy and unclean. An abomination that should have been culled as soon as it crawled its way out of its egg. It hurts, it tears you apart from the inside. You need to know why. You need it like you've needed nothing like the law before. Pyralsprite noses you, uncomfortable and uneasy with the sudden decision you've made. You search them out, these remnants of an uprising, you want to find every shred you can and you track them down at every point you come across their trails.

The worst thing is when you come across them because of course you were hunting them, _every_ legislacerator and subjuggulator who can stand up is hunting them (hunting her, he's been cast out and you think the Grand Highblood just wants him to go away and never return), and he acts like you're a threat. You don't cry often, you've so rarely wept before these cycles but your eyes sting anew at the corners as he draws his bow on you. She's hidden behind his frame, a ragged thing, still clutching those bloody remnants and you wish so much that you could hate him. He looks tired, so tired, and still bloody from the beating that the Grand Highblood had ordered for him before turning him out. It would have been better if he'd done anything except look for her, but. You understand, you suppose, it's not as though you don't know what being pale for someone feels like. It's just. 

You'd thought he'd felt it for you too.

"Horuss." Your voice is so dry, you think it's a wonder that you don't spit flame. Pyralsprite mutters behind you, uneasy and displeased. You've cried so much your eyes ache, giving you a new reason for your title. A subjuggulator would laugh over it, if you'd dare to take your glasses off around them. "I would never have expected to find you here."

"Did you not."

Oh, he sounds so tired, so tired. You want to wrap him up and keep him warm, you want to drag him to a pile and pin him down under the sharp-pointed edges of your bone and carapace until he relaxes and he's yours once more. Your pale isn't all kind, and maybe that's why he. Maybe she. She. Ah, it rips you from the inside as she peers around his broad shoulder to stare at you, more fearless than anyone of her hue has a right to be of someone of your blood and occupation. You hate her. You'd destroy her in an instant, if it meant you could have back what you did once. But now you know. Now he knows. And you're left screaming in the emptiness inside your head, while your hands grab at ashes and burned hopes, at broken thoughts and regretful secrets you'd told him when he was yours.

He isn't yours, anymore. The way he shields _her_ from _you_ only solidifies that thought and a tiredness strikes you so deep to your bones you just want to go to your knees. Crumble. How are you meant to do this if he isn't there? How are you meant to keep walking through the doors of a bloodcaste that wanted to use you as an art material and never mind how sharp your mind is or how good you are at your job. 

If he has his perfect palematch, where's yours. 

The universe is a cruel and unusual bitch, to do this to you. To any troll. You had thought that maybe you had found your palematch, some quarter of troll serendipity. You don't know how you both had got it so wrong. How could he leave you so easily for this?

"Horuss...the Grand Highblood may still forgive you, it's not too late," you speak, knowing even as you say it that there's no way he'll ever give up protecting her. Your moirallegiance may not have been any seeding ground for a great romance, but this is. It had been a more comfortable thing than this, born out of ashes and blood. It had been made up of cups of tea, of advice given and offered, of early mornings spent discussing the morality and complexity of the law, of what it meant to serve the Empire - and he's given it up for this. It had never been grand, but it had been a comfort and it had been yours and his, and he's found something better than you. You don't think it's made him happy, though, not like he was when you settled around that administrative plane in times close to dawn, empty teacups to one side and Imperial paperwork spread across it between you for your argumentative delight.

"It is. Far too late." He sighs, and it's deep and heavy. He looks so tired, so so so tired. Why isn't she making sure he doesn't look so tired? Your grip tightens on your cane harder, until you can feel the edges of the grip cutting into your palm, as like to make you bleed. That would be a pity, as it would make your sword slip in your hand if you had to draw it. But it feels like the pain of the edges of the dragon's skull was the only thing keeping you upright, at this moment. "Go back, Neophyte. You have a career, a _life_ ahead of you. It would be remiss of me to ask you to throw that away...especially when there is so much more that you can accomplish in the course of your life. For the Empire, or for yourself perhaps, as you will."

"If we just -"

" _Neophyte._ There is no hope. You know this."

"There must be _something_ \- some precedent, allowing you to return, at least. I can _find_ something -"

"Stop." His voice thuds into your rambled fantasizings of some way you can fix this, fix him, fix _both_ of you, and brings you to a crashing halt. As much as you hate it, he can still do that to you. Make you be still. A breath rasps through your lungs, your throat, and you still. Your fingers twitch as you stare down that oliveblooded bitch behind him, yearning for the caress of sisal against your skin. You'd see her hang, and you can't even lie about it to yourself. She's guilty - more than guilty - she's a traitor. "Neophyte. Are you going to allow us to go our way or not?"

You hesitate, because you have never wanted to cull a troll so badly as you do right now. It's perhaps wise of her, that she's remained silent. You wonder if she still has the bloody pants of her abomination of a matesprit. Disgusting. Who took something like _that_ as a memento? 

"...the law directs me otherwise. You know-" Oh horrorterrors, does he know, you had taken comfort once in the thought that there was at least someone who would keep you to your course when sometimes you simply wanted to explode - " _You_ know what my directive is."

"Neophyte." A beat and then he sighs. "Latula."

"And what's _her_ name? Have you even asked?"

"It's Meulin, and yes, he did ask." 

You bare your teeth and hiss, slow and terrible like your mother. You'd eat her, you'd _devour_ her and take every part of her that you're missing that would have seen her steal his pale over your previous claim. You know better and you step backwards. You can't make him feel pale for you, when he's so obviously pale for her. The worst thing is, you know he's never looked at you the way he looks at _her_. The hate in you for her is nothing passionate, it's nothing clean. It's dark and ugly. Damn it all, you want to tear her throat out.

"Go."

"Latula-"

"Horuss, I swear, if you don't leave now, I can't answer for what I'll do."

Your voice shakes, but he nods. You can almost taste the last pot of tea you brewed together on your tongue and you step aside. You let them go. You let them pass into the dawn, his broad shoulders and her sleek leanness. Clutching something to her rumblespheres, like it could save her. You bet it's that disgusting blood-stained trophy she'd torn from the corpse of her previous quadrant.

And just like that, he's gone.

You never see him again.


	3. Postscript

Later when you face a gamblignant in cerulean blue against the backdrop of a ship on fire while she screams curses and bleeds all over the wood because your lusus ate her arm, you wonder no more at how easily Darkleer had walked away from an entire Empire to follow an oliveblooded rebel. The difference between the two of you, is that you don't walk away. You follow the law to its bitter end and all the consequences of what that means for you.

When you're hanging from your own noose, lifted there by lowbloods who'd been meant to watch a great victory for justice and the law, you wonder if you had made the right choice in the end, after all of that. He isn't there to ask. And neither is the gamblignant, who you would doubt holds the same feelings to you as you think you could hold towards her. She's gone, and very soon, you no longer care for any of your quadrants, pale or otherwise as the rope that you've used to take the lives of so many miscreants, takes yours along with it.

If there's a post subscript, you're not the one who's going to write it.

You have to wonder what the oliveblooded bitch who stole your moirail from you would have thought if she knew that you'd taken up Sufferist leanings in the time since she and Horuss had passed into history. Not into the history _books_ , no. No. The Empress would never have allowed that. But you'd had to know, you'd had to understand what could take him from you.

It felt wrong that it felt so _right_ , these words of rebellion. That trolls should be valued for their abilities, not their blood. That trolls should support each other, work together in kindness. It was like a vast heady dream that had sung to secret spaces inside you. And even knowing what the fate of the one who had written the words of the Scriptures of the Sufferer were, of how she'd gone into exile and nameless ignominy, how she'd taken your moirail with her. You can't help seeing the sense of his words. 

It might not have been a bad thing to meet him, the arguments you could have had with him would have been legendary. You feel cheated. But then again, you've been cheated of so many things.

You have to suppose it doesn't matter now. The Empire will keep on being itself, bloodthirsty and body-hungry. There is nothing that any of you could have done to change anything. As much as you struggle against the hands lifting you up, the rough caress of the noose around your throat, you don't know what you could have done to change anything. 

It's not really a comfort.

But it is an ending.


End file.
